1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention relate generally to wireless digital communication and, more specifically, to confirmed link level broadcasts using parallel receivers.
2. Description of the Related Art
A conventional wireless mesh network includes a plurality of nodes configured to communicate with one another. A given node within the wireless mesh network may transmit messages to, and receive messages from, neighboring nodes in order to propagate those messages across the entire network. A source node may thus communicate with a destination node by way of intermediate nodes within the network.
When a source node transmits a message to a destination node, an application executing within the destination node may respond by transmitting an acknowledgement message back to the source node. This acknowledgment message is propagated across the wireless mesh network in the same fashion as the original message transmitted by the source node, i.e. by way of intermediate nodes. In situations where the application within the destination node fails to respond to the source node with an acknowledgement message, the source node may then re-send the original message. The acknowledgement technique described above is known in the art as “application layer acknowledgement.”
Application layer acknowledgement suffers from at least two drawbacks. First, the acknowledgement transmitted from the destination node may require a large number of “hops” across intermediate nodes before propagating back to the source node. Consequently, a correspondingly large amount of time may elapse before the source node is able to determine whether the message successfully arrived at the destination node or should be re-sent. Second, in situations where multiple destination nodes are targeted by single source node transmission (e.g., a broadcast or multicast transmission), the source node may become flooded with multiple acknowledgement messages that are simultaneously received from the multiple destination nodes. Such a flood may overwhelm and potentially disable the source node.
As the foregoing illustrates, what is needed in the art is an improved technique for acknowledging message transmissions in a wireless mesh network.